https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/26/substack-turns-on-its-nazis-welcome-sign/ I honestly find posts like this quite fascinating, as Mike didn't always bend over backwards like this to excuse people attacking sites over their moderation policies supposedly being too permissive.

https://reason.com/2023/12/21/substackers-battle-over-banning-nazis/ For instance, here is a more principled take. It's not anything particularly shocking, it's just a pretty traditional take on free speech. She's also not someone who is a fan of the "War on Porn" and has written a fair bit about that.

Of the two, Elizabeth is naturally the one who is far more correct, and Mike is the one who doesn't understand how any of this works. Perhaps, Substack is not the best example, as they're more selective, but it isn't as if there haven't been examples which had porn on them.

Once a site gets to a certain scale, and they're chasing vague conceptions of "harm" in Silicon Valley, it seems that it leads to a whole bunch of nonsense, and ignoring that is simply to ignore the majority of what is going on in the world. Mike keeps losing sight of that and that is his problem. He doesn't even attempt to address this, and that is why his arguments come off as so hollow.

It's worth mentioning that whether it's sexual expression being removed by a platform, or anything else for that matter, I don't think I have ever seen a case where Mike has gone "woah there, too far". Not. One. Case. Not recently at least.

If Mike at least showed up occasionally to be like, "Alright, you have gone too far in this area", then I might have given him more of the benefit of the doubt, however, Elizabeth looks like the adult in the room here.